A $90 million retail center deal near Los Angeles is among the highest-priced transactions of the past year for a suburban region where large sales in the category are rare.

Primestor Development acquired the 357,000-square-foot Esplanade Shopping Center in Oxnard, California, in Ventura County, the Culver City investor said in a statement. The property was built in 2002 at 151-271 W. Esplanade Drive, about 60 miles west of Los Angeles.

CoStar data showed this was Ventura County’s largest retail property deal of the past year by total price and also the county’s largest commercial property deal of any kind. It is the past year’s second-largest retail deal by total price for the Los Angeles-Ventura region overall.

DRA Advisors of New York sold the property for about $252 per square foot, just 6% less than what the company paid for the site in 2018, CoStar and public filings show.

The average transaction size in Ventura County has been about 12,000 square feet in the past year for an average price of $3.8 million.

The open-air center was 94% leased at the time of its latest sale by tenants including Home Depot, Nordstrom Rack, Staples, Dick’s Sporting Goods, T.J. Maxx and Walmart Neighborhood Market.

Low Vacancy

The investment allowed the buyer to acquire an “institutional-quality, necessity retail asset located in a high-traffic area with a favorable mix of cash flow stability and embedded value-add potential,” Primestor Chief Investment Officer Lonnie Vidaurri said in a statement.

Ventura County has a relatively low retail vacancy rate at 5.9%, with rent growth of 2.9% over the past year, on par with national averages. The county posted $226 million in retail property sales during the past 12 months, down 50% from the prior year, according to CoStar data.

The Ventura County retail market supports many high-income households, with an economy supported by tourism in coastal communities and the region’s interior wine country. Like other Southern California coastal regions, Ventura’s retail projects under construction remain low by historical standards at just over 29,000 square feet.

“Although quarterly leasing volume has fallen by about 40% relative to the pre-pandemic norm, that has less to do with waning demand than a lack of adequate space to source,” according to a CoStar regional market report.

Primestor officials said the acquired retail center serves an area with 130,000 permanent residents nearby, 68% of whom are Latino and 52% are under age 35. Alan Sneider, the company’s vice president of acquisitions, said the purchase represented an “expansion of our investments beyond the greater Los Angeles area into a growing market.”

Primestor was started in 1991 and has invested more than $1 billion to date primarily in urban, mixed-use real estate, the statement said.